forms of the surrounding futures

In the organizer's words:

"In dealing with the asymmetries and violent escapades that define the present, it would be wrong to forget the future - the here and now is simply not enough. Queerness should and could be about the desire for a different way of being, both in the world and in time, a desire that resists the compulsion to settle for what is not enough." (José Estebean Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2009)

forms of the surrounding futures responds to the current state of permanent crisis by embodying and celebrating plural narratives beyond a normative dominance for a tomorrow in the exhibited works and performances. In doing so, the exhibition bypasses prevailing paradigms that uphold the status quo and anticipate possible futures in order to understand our present time as a moment of transformation full of potentiality. An expanded concept of "queer" forms the starting point to question the prevailing paradigms and power structures and to rethink and reshape the construction of bodies, spaces and times.

With the adaptation of GIBCA 2023 (Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art), Kunsthalle Münster uses works by international artists to take up narratives that use the collective ability to imagine and rehearse future worlds: Dreams, community-building practices, vulnerability and desire serve as starting points for reinventing the potential as well as the limits of body and language.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, feminist, LGBTQ+ and racialized voices have occupied a central place in the struggle against structures of inequality and established themselves as champions of alternative scenarios. Change is regularly the result of the struggles of the oppressed. Sexualized and racialized "others" have always been more exposed to critical situations, which means that they are at the forefront of social struggles. To want to eliminate the dominant structures also includes the intersectional struggle for equal and non-compliant forms of life - a struggle that is also being waged for the interdependent and interwoven systems of life on the planet.

forms of the surrounding futures forges an alliance of others, addressing shared urgent needs and upholding plural narratives of a tomorrow. The project follows the position of geographer Natalie Oswin: "queer", according to her, represents a challenge to the norm, namely in that queer "operates beyond a power and control that enforces normativity" and thereby involves a "radical (re)thinking, (re)drawing, (re)conceptualizing, (re)measuring" that is "capable of (re)making bodies, spaces and geographies" (Natalie Oswin, Critical Geographies And The Uses Of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space, 2008). In such an expanded understanding, queer becomes visible as a collective, emancipative position that includes racialized, sexualized and naturalized others and places them in non-normative proximity to one another, so that the constructed nature of the present becomes just as visible as the emergence of multiple futures.